Read an Excerpt
Lion Songs
Thomas Mapfumo and the Music that Made Zimbabwe
By Banning Eyre Duke University Press
Copyright © 2015 Banning Eyre
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7542-5
CHAPTER 1
England Is the Chameleon, and I the Fly
I may die, but my bones will rise again.
MBUYA NEHANDA AT HER EXECUTION IN 1897
We are the bones.
THOMAS MAPFUMO IN 1988
The Zimbabwe plateau is a territory apart, a stone house aloof from its neighbors. Two big rivers surround it, the slow, silty Limpopo in the south, and the churning Zambezi up north, which plunges over the ledges of Victoria Falls and thunders into a series of bone-crushing rapids before flowing east into Mozambique. Along the plateau's eastern edge, the Chimanimani Mountains throw up a rugged wall one hundred miles short of the Indian Ocean. For centuries, this geography protected the Shona clans in their peaceful pastoral. While tsetse flies savaged herds in surrounding lowlands, the Shona thrived amid wind, sun, fertile grasslands, and robust livestock. Even in the mid-nineteenth century, when Ndebele interlopers surged up from the south, followed soon by the Rhodesians, and the plateau became a place of conflict and killing, Shona agrarians still herded and harvested, raising their children under the watchful gaze of their ancestors. The elders who saw Thomas Mapfumo through his boyhood in the Marandellas Tribal Trust Lands were among these — people of the past, both protected and constrained by their spirits.
Janet Chinhamo delivered her first child on July 2, 1945. The boy's father, Tapfumaneyi Mupariwa, was a Korekore Shona man from Guruve in the remote rugged valleys of Dande. An itinerant musician and "one-man band," Tapfumaneyi made a scant living driving tractors at farms in Mashonaland. He was too poor to pay Janet's lobola (bride-price), so no marriage could occur. "When I was pregnant," recalled Janet, "Thomas's father paid a little lobola, but not enough. And then he went for good." At age seventeen, Thomas would seek out and befriend his real father, and come to think of himself too as a "Korekore man." Thomas would always revere his mother's people who raised him in Marandellas (now Marondera), but the Shona pray to the spirits of the paternal clan, so Thomas's true "rural area" would always lie in Dande. The elasticity of African life rendered these facts all but invisible to most people Thomas encountered in his youth. But long after he achieved stardom, fans would still whisper about his "illegitimate" birth, revealing in hushed tones a strand of mystery concealed within the fabric of his celebrity.
In the beginning, though, things are simpler. The first light ignites towers of boulders, huge faun-colored Easter eggs as much part of the azure sky as the apple green earth. It brightens dewdrops on curved blades of grass, racing to vaporize the water before the rough tongues of groggy cattle arrive. The herd boy's switch keeps everything in motion, the rising breeze, the hoof-fall of cows, the fleeting surreality of dawn's panorama. The boy sings a song he learned from his ambuya (grandmother), something about the great ancestor spirit Chaminuka, something about glory. There are words he can't understand — ancient phrases whose meanings have been lost — but he sings them anyway. A smoke flag flies above a thatched mud-and-pole roundhouse. Ambuya is cooking sadza (stiff cornmeal porridge). He claps his cupped hands together to greet her. The spirits are not seen, but they notice, and now he can reach out to ambuya and know she will smile and feed him, and the real work of the day will begin.
Janet herself grew up on a farm. It was owned by a white man she remembered only as "Mr. Brown." She first met Tapfumaneyi through his sister, a domestic worker at a white household in the Avondale district of Salisbury. In the 1940s, rural people were drawn to the cities by work, and African townships bloomed at the edges of white Salisbury (now Harare) and Bulawayo. Janet and Tapfumaneyi came together in the shuffle between farm and city. When she discovered she was pregnant, she went to see him in Seke, and he told her he could never satisfy the financial demands of her family. Janet returned alone to her post at Imbwa Farm in Kandege and gave birth there. She brought the baby to her parents, Hamundidi and Kufera Munhumumwe, in Marondera. She named the baby Michael, for no reason anyone could recall. Michael Munhumumwe (Thomas's childhood name) would remain with his mother's people for almost ten years, while she prepared a home and family of her own fifty miles away.
Nights are cold and days hot around harvest time. Then comes chisi — a strictly enforced day of rest. No one works the soil during chisi. The n'anga arrives with his furs and snuff, ready to fulfill his shamanic role. The sekurus — uncles — drink their millet beer and start telling funny stories, these hard men all of a sudden jokesters. And at night the mbira sound for the elders, but the music is so loud at times that the youngest children can catch the melody and sense the depth, even gravity, it conveys. Older boys play the ngoma drums, and all the children dance. Moonlight is best. No workday is too long, no rain too cold nor sun too hot, no elder too mean — as long as everything ends with dancing and songs, laughter and moonlight, and the all-encompassing embrace of a big family.
Janet's people were peasant farmers in the "communal lands" that the Rhodesians had set aside for rural Africans. Marondera lies in Mashonaland East, about a hundred kilometers southeast of Salisbury, along the road that leads to Manicaland and the city of Mutare before crossing the mountains into Mozambique. Janet's parents produced eleven children, she being the eldest, followed soon by Jira. The youngest, Marshall Munhumumwe, would one day be a famous musician, like Thomas. Three of Janet's siblings died as children when a hut caught fire in a heavy wind. Their bodies were burned and swept away amid smoke and ashes, an aching reminder of what spirits can do when riled to anger.
When they received young Michael, Hamundidi and Kufera lived on the farm of a white man named Simons. Soon afterward, they were granted village land of their own, and they moved the family there. This is the first place Thomas Mapfumo can remember, and it is a place of enchantment, full of animals, spirits, open spaces, and natural delights. On just a few acres of land, his grandparents grew maize, rapoko, groundnuts, wheat, and sweet potatoes and kept cattle, pigs, goats, and donkeys. They lived tight with the children in a traditional round hut, subjects now of a village headman rather than a white farmer. Hamundidi and Kufera would drift into old age this way, at a distance from the churning tumult of the liberation struggle. They would die a few years short of Zimbabwe's independence.
Michael was put to work as soon as he could wield a stick and mind goats and cows. His constant companion was his uncle Peter, almost the same age as him. "We used to take our cattle a long distance to grazing places," Thomas recalled, starting well before sunrise, as "the cows would love to graze on that wet grass." The boys would spend the day whistling after animals, foraging for wild fruits — hacha (wild cork fruit), matamba (monkey orange), and mapfura (marula) — and fishing in streams and ponds. For Thomas, it was "an exciting life," if austere. Once he recalled asking his grandfather permission to bathe. The old man replied, "You want to wash? Is it Christmas?"
At Thomas's birth in 1945, Southern Rhodesia was as settled and peaceful as it would ever be. Whites had their farms and cities, Africans their reserves and townships. If anything seemed to threaten the Rhodesians' ordered world, it was the meddling British, not Africans. Rhodesians believed deeply in their own permanence, even though nothing had ever been permanent on the Zimbabwe plateau.
Historians lament the scarcity of knowledge about ancient doings in this part of Africa. The people collectively called the Shona — more precisely, the Manica, Korekore, Kalanga, Zezuru, and others — originated in the Cameroon highlands more than three thousand years ago. They are part of the great Bantu river of humanity that flowed across most of Africa long before any white man set foot on the continent. Between 500 BC and AD 500, Bantu immigrants infiltrated Khoisan-speaking hunter-gatherer communities on the plateau, and their shared descendants became today's Shona clans. The plateau was a place of bounty. Herds of elephants, laden with ivory tusks, roamed freely, and there were gold reefs one could mine with simple hand tools. The Bantu built fixed settlements, farmed the land, and forged iron tools and weapons. By AD 700, they were trading with Muslims on the East African coast. Shona archaeological sites have yielded beads of Syrian glass, Persian faience and carpet, and Chinese celadon and porcelain. The thirteenth-century Arab explorer Ibn Battuta found gold dust for sale in the port city of Sofala and reported that it had come from "Yufi in the land of the Limiyin ... a month's journey" inland. The place-names are mysterious, but the gold likely came from the Shona. Through Arab middlemen, Shona exchanged gold, ivory, copper, and leopard skins for goods and knowledge. Weaving methods gleaned from coastal Muslims allowed them to make cloth heavy enough to protect them from the greatest killer they faced on the plateau — the cold winds of June and July.
"Zimbabwe" means "house of stone," a reference to the structures found in ruins throughout the country. The most extensive is Great Zimbabwe, with its circular, granite-walled enclosure and cone-shaped boulder tower. Great Zimbabwe was the only real city in this part of Africa in precolonial times, built by the Shona between 1250 and 1450, and probably home to some eighteen thousand people at its height. Its massive walls and mysterious tower apparently served beauty or religion, not defense. Decorated walls and stone pillars topped with bird figures carved from soapstone suggest a scene of ritual, but no firsthand description of any rite survives, tantalizing the imaginations of poets and allowing prominent Rhodesian scholars to claim that Arabs or Phoenicians — anyone but Africans! — created Great Zimbabwe. Why the city was abruptly abandoned around 1500 remains a stubborn unknown.
The face of human power begins to come into focus only with the reign of the Munhumutapas, a series of authoritarian kings who rose in the wake of Great Zimbabwe. The Munhumutapas refused to deal in slaves, an admirable choice that likely contributed to their sparse representation in recorded history. Shona oral accounts go back only to about 1700 and have been corrupted by successive rewritings, as historian David Beach notes, "omitting rulers, condensing and altering events and generally making them fit the political needs of the day, whether in 1763, 1862 or 1958."
The Portuguese dominated the plateau briefly, only to be forced out by the Changamire Rozvi state, the last great Shona polity and the strongest military force in southern Africa at the end of the seventeenth century. Over the next hundred years, Changamire too would fade as the gold fields of the southwest became depleted. Trade with Shona goldmines stopped entirely after 1800, and the elephant population was all but gone. War and dwindling wealth had devastated the northern plateau, leaving behind isolated communities plagued by disease and disunity. Beach writes of "a bewildering variety of Shona territories" at the dawn of the nineteenth century.
In this weakened state, the Shona confronted a foe more disruptive than any they had known. The mfecane, or "crushing," was a violent outpouring of people from the Nguni language group, who surged north as they fled the militant rampages of warrior king Shaka Zulu (1787–1828). The resulting effulgence of bloodletting reached as far north as the equator and left an indelible legacy on the Zimbabwe plateau in the form of two new states — Gaza in the southeast and Ndebele in the southwest.
The Ndebele seized Shona land. They purveyed a culture of expansion and conquest quite alien to the Shona. This inspired fear but also a certain admiration. The Ndebele lifestyle — "distinctively clad and armed young men enjoying a life of raiding, increased access to young women and beef eating" — dazzled Shona men. The Shona had no hope of defeating such an enemy, especially after 1837, when the Ndebele king Mzilikazi arrived with his impis (armies). Displaced from their land and menaced by raids, many Shona embraced Mzilikazi.
As internal divisions destabilized his regime, Mzilikazi famously beheaded disloyal chiefs, a ritual that gave the Ndebele capital its name: Kwa Bulawayo, "the killing place." Rhodesian propaganda would later sensationalize Ndebele brutality, portraying the Shona as hapless victims of an unstoppable Ndebele juggernaut. Schoolbooks would fraudulently suggest that only English benevolence had saved the Shona from complete destruction. In fact, the arrival of the English amplified mistrust between Shona and Ndebele, motivating each to betray the other's interests to gain advantage with a new enemy. Today's Shona and Ndebele inherit this thorny legacy of fact and myth, bitterness and awe, a legacy that complicated the liberation war and remains a dark undercurrent in the affairs of Zimbabwe.
The first English prospectors, missionaries, and adventurers began filtering onto the plateau around 1866. David Livingstone's magnificent description of Victoria Falls, and the potential riches of this untamed land, proved irresistible. It was late in the colonial game, but one more frontier remained. Shona towns and villages were now islands amid a sea of dangers. Great swaths of the plateau lay unused and unprotected. Anthony Thomas writes that the nineteenth-century Shona had no concept of "owning" land: "Land was where cattle grazed and wild animals were hunted. Like sunshine and rain, it had been provided for everyone." Land also held the bones of ancestors, and people had to return to certain places at certain times in order to appease family spirits. Restricted movement was thus a cruel fate for the Shona.
"I am the owner of this land," Thomas Mapfumo said once, speaking for his Shona forebears in their first encounters with Europeans. "They found me here, and I was generous enough to give them space to live also. 'Live with me like a brother.' But instead, they didn't see that. They had to enslave me, to make me work hard for my own life, for protection. For everything that I needed, I had to sweat." Thomas's generation of Zimbabweans grew up with this history, but for him, raised on a farm and working the land with his own hands, the truth of it cut deep.
The first Ndebele, a people born of war, built armies to fight the English. Mzilikazi, after all, had taken on Shaka Zulu himself. But when he died in 1868, Mzilikazi left his kingdom and impis to his less experienced son, Lobengula, whose fate it was to defend or lose all his father had established. Though the two men would never meet, Lobengula's true adversary in this struggle would be Cecil John Rhodes.
History offers up few men like Rhodes. The son of an English vicar, he was a sickly boy with a defective heart and big dreams. He went to South Africa in 1870 to convalesce with his older brother Herbert, who oversaw a diamond claim near Kimberly. Rhodes arrived a "shy, solemn, delicate-looking, fair- haired, gangling boy of eighteen." Eight years later, when Herbert died in an explosion, Cecil took over what would become the most profitable diamond empire in the world, De Beers. In those days, Rhodes divided his time between the Kimberly mines and Oxford. He showed little interest in study — ironic, considering the scholarship that bears his name — and historians wonder why he bothered with university at all when adventure and fortune awaited him in Africa. One satisfies himself with the conclusion that Rhodes "never grew up." Others look deeper, speculating about his secret homosexuality, likely; and his mercurial will to power in many forms, undeniable.
There are flashes of humanity in Rhodes's early story. He earned the respect of African workers on a cotton farm in Natal, insisting that they be paid in advance. He wrote admiringly of their customs and the value they placed in a man's trust. He once intervened to prevent a chief from being forced off his farm by settlers. Later, wielding real power, Rhodes became hardened. He enacted racist regulations at the Kimberly mines and discriminatory laws in the Cape Colony, and he seized more than one million square miles of African land, riling critics with remarks like "I prefer land to niggers!"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lion Songs by Banning Eyre. Copyright © 2015 Banning Eyre. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
